Quote Originally Posted by tofur View Post
trying to locate memories stored in the brain, the source of electrical activity in the brain (we can trace it to a certain point, but can't figure out what gives rise to the first bit of activity, it gets to a point where it seems to come out of nowhere and some unseen force outside the brain is creating it), etc.
I'm not even sure what you mean by that.... Electricity in the brain is generated from the incredible amount of chemical reactions occurring simultaneously. Science is well aware of this. You're going to have to be more specific on that if I'm misunderstanding something.

As for where memories are recorded, I recommend you read this: Optogenetic stimulation of a hippocampal engram activates fear memory recall. This is a study which tests individual neuron clusters in mice as a theoretical basis of where memories are stored. They condition certain rats with fear memory and then label the brain cells in the hippocampus, long thought to be a major memory center, that were activated at the time of the conditioning. When they stimulated only these specific clusters later, the mice which were not conditioned showed no reaction but the mice which were began to react as if the fear-inducing event was happening again. When they later removed the neurons, the mice lost this reaction. The conclusion was that these neuron clusters seem highly probable as a place where memories (or memory fragments, as memories are known to not be stored as a whole regardless of where they are) are recorded, and as a focus of how memories could be theoretically removed. If you can find any theory or information which has more weight than this, I'm all ears.

Quote Originally Posted by tofur View Post
I don't pretend to be as intelligent as the people dedicating their lives to this kind of work, I just read what conclusions they have come to. The ones who aren't attached to the dogmatic materialist view on things are shying away from concluding the brain produces consciousness, as crazy as that sounds. True science doesn't care if it sounds crazy, it just follows the evidence. At the moment nothing is set in stone, we just dont know enough and we've been very held back by the rigid views of classical physics and peoples resistance to where the evidence is leading. Pretty standard response though, nothing new in humanities history.
Evidence supporting something and lack of evidence against something are not the same thing. Just because there has been, up until recently, some issues in discovering the location of memories in the brain doesn't mean even slightly that they must be stored somewhere else. The brain is unbelievably complex and so much of it is beyond our knowledge that the thought that we should have figured out everything about it by now is completely laughable.

You are right in saying that "true" science follows the evidence, no matter what. So where is the evidence that what you're saying is correct?